I noticed on Tom Kyte’s bog that the Oracle Database Enterprise Edition (EE) option Total Recall has ceased to exist as an separate option at list price of 5.800 $ per processer.

The Functionality has been added to the EE option Oracle Advanced Compression at 11.500 $ per processer with the name “Flasback Data Archive (Total Recall)”.

Not that this the first time Oracle has changed content, add or removed EE options but what is inconvenient is that there is no official placed to follow the changes that Oracle makes over time to product.

The individual Oracle manuals has a part numbers and the “Oracle Database Licensing Information 11g Release 2 (11.2)“ guide is at present called “E10594-26” where the “-26” stands for version/revision. This indicates that the license guide has changed 26 times since it was released but this is not true since I can remember that the first version of this manual that was at OTN was called “E10594-04”.

But back to the problem there is no official way to track changes in the Oracle manuals like there is when upgrading to an Oracle database patch set where it is possible to download the “11.2.0.3 Patch Set – List of Bug Fixes by Problem type [ID 13483003.1]” that describes generic changes in the patch set.

Since changes in the manual could be minor change (spelling error) or like in this case a change of a database option you properly should reference to a part number if it is in a legal context and by the way download the manual(s) since Oracle don’t have place where you can find old versions of the manuals (I know it is possible to Google a part number and find a manual but it does not work for all versions).

I think that Oracle should add a change list to the individual manuals that describes the changes made to the manual at each revision / version and a place where we could find the revision / version.